“The terrorist attacks and intimidation will continue, but the postmodern technological societies will consider themselves so strong, their capacity for cultural absorption so extensive, that nothing will prevent them from believing that they can also assimilate the terrorist act as is already done with car accidents. and natural disasters. The most likely scenario will be one in which nothing happens and everything continues like this, with the internal fracture of the West, the birth of two parallel societies, the continuous debasement of culture, up to its irrelevance.
“We will entrench ourselves even further behind our illusory Maginot lines, distracting ourselves with the psychodramas of America’s racism in Ferguson, the correct spelling in gender identity documents, bathrooms for transsexuals and celebrity gossip. Radical Islam knows that as long as it avoids another great massacre such as 9/11, it can continue to take away some human lives and undermine the West without waking it from sleep”.
Four years ago, this is how I ended my book, “The Suicide of Western Culture”. I thought about these words when I read the recent news from France.
What would have happened if, in France, a Muslim doctor, in front of his children’s school, had been stabbed to death by a Christian shouting “Jesus is great”? We can imagine the political class, the newspapers and the so-called “intellectuals”. In a reversal of roles, it has happened, but the political class, the newspapers and the so-called “intellectuals” have not talked at all about this item of news.
“The death of Alban Gervaise relegated to the pages of various news outlets”. Thus the Causeur magazine summarizes the ghastly story from Marseille. Military doctor Alban Gervaise was stabbed in the throat a dozen times while his murderer cried “Allahu Akbar” as the doctor went to bring his 3 and 7-year-old children to their Catholic school. The attacker’s name is Mohammed.
Why so much silence? “Rejection. Cowardice. Complicity. Collaborationism”. So writes Sarah Cattan in La Tribune de Juive. “Why did the death of Alban Gervaise, slaughtered in front of the school where he had just taken his two children aged 3 and 7, remain in the information substrate?”
L’Union wondered:
“Alban Gervaise, a name that does not and will not tell you anything. It seems established that, from now on, no one will be offended that a father of a family can be stabbed ‘in the name of Allah’.
“The fear of being accused of acute Islamophobia or worse, of belonging to the Zemmourian fasciosphere, suffocates collective indignation. The age we live in is not very glorious. In a few days Alban Gervaise will go from indifference to oblivion. Except for his wife and her children”.
The historian and essayist Maxime Tandonnet says a lot, if not all: “Has France called ‘from above’, through politics and media, mobilized by mutual tacit agreement to erase the terrible tragedy as much as possible? Dominant or influential circles like to wage fake wars against viruses to keep people at bay . But the real war on the territory, the one that continues its massacres, with or without madness, we prefer to deny in cowardly fashion, to hide the collapse it reveals and the dark hours it announces.”
Nicholas Sarkozy’s former special adviser, Henri Guaino, even said that “civil war can come to France.”
We saw the silence on Alban Gervaise just 72 hours earlier in the killing of René Hadjadj, an elderly Jew thrown from the 17th floor of his building by his Muslim neighbor. Now the hypothesis of an anti-Semitic matrix in the killing of Hadjadj is no longer excluded.
It is the same silence that has been heard for years over the burning churches. “Most of the time they don’t even arouse emotion”, writes the famous historian Marc Knobel in an extraordinary investigation published by La regle du jeu. “The facts are reported very soberly by the local press, more rarely by regional newspapers. In most cases, the articles are published in the ‘various news’ sections. Short articles, sprinkled with a few quotes, a mayor, a priest, a police officer, a faithful. 750 churches vandalized and desecrated in one year. An average of two churches a day”.
The French philosopher Julien Freund had a professor, Jean Hyppolite, who told him that he did not want to read a dissertation that defended the idea that there can be no politics without an enemy. “If he’s really right – Hyppolite told Freund – I just have to cultivate my garden”.
Freund replied: “Listen, Hyppolite, you are making a mistake, because you think you are the one designating the enemy and that as long as we don’t want enemies we won’t have them. But it is the enemy who designates us. And if it wants you to be the enemy, you can offer the best friendship there is to offer, but as long as it wants you to be the enemy, you will be. And that enemy will also prevent you from cultivating the garden.”
But the European political class and our dear media are under the illusion of being able to cultivate the garden. At least while they manage to hide the weeds.
